Somehow, everything I work with gets dismissed by the professional community. PHP is no exception. "It's dying" — I read it on Reddit, in Telegram, I hear it at job interviews. And yet here we are in 2025: PHP powers roughly 77% of server-side web, WordPress runs a third of the internet, Laravel is one of the most forked frameworks on GitHub.
So why doesn't the myth die?
It's not about the language
Over three years of working with it, I've noticed the criticism comes from two places. First: people who wrote PHP in 2009, when it genuinely looked rough. Their experience was real. Their conclusions just haven't been updated. Second: people who've never written a line of it but absorbed the consensus from their bubble. That's not a take, that's an echo.
Modern PHP — from 8.0 onward — has fibers, match expressions, named arguments, enums, readonly properties. It's not the spaghetti everyone remembers. I work with it alongside C# and Python, and each has its domain. PHP earns its place on the web: fast deploys, massive ecosystem, hosting infrastructure that just works.
Any tool in professional hands becomes an asset, not an obstacle.
Bad code isn't a language problem
When people say "PHP is bad", they usually mean "I saw bad PHP code once". I've seen it too. I've inherited it. But I've also seen catastrophic Python and terrible C# from people who really should have known better.
Bad code is a skill problem. Blaming the language is comfortable because it removes the need to ask whether your own practices are the issue.
Interviews ask the wrong questions
At one interview, someone was surprised I work with "a new CMS engine that's already eleven years old". They meant Bitrix D7 — which, to be clear, is the new engine inside Bitrix. Ironic. But telling: people react to the stigma around a name without looking at what's actually inside.
More useful questions would be: does this person understand SOLID? Can they explain an architectural decision — not just what they did, but why? Can they do code review? Language choice follows from all of that, not the other way around.
PHP is not dead. It's just not trendy. Those are different things.